Indications at the weekend are that all may not be well at the Nigerian Export-Import Bank (NEXIM), following allegations of high-level fraud in the disbursement of loans by the former management team.
Sources within NEXIM and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the audit firm, pointed to several violations of laid down procedures, as reflected in the bank’s unprecedented Non-Performing Loan (NPL) ratio at 91% of its total loan book.
“That level of fraud within the system is perhaps why the CBN is yet to activate the N500bn Export Stimulation Fund set up to promote non-oil exports in Nigeria,” one of the sources lamented.
The ESF was last year revamped, using the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme model, just as the CBN introduced a N50 billion direct intervention funding for NEXIM, which Godwin Emefiele, the apex bank told journalists was to further the country’s economic diversification efforts. It was also to develop sources of foreign exchange, especially in the agriculture value chain and reduce the reliance on crude oil earnings.
“We want to encourage exporters with the N500bn Export Facility to increase the volume of export earnings that is routed back to the economy to help us grow the economy,” Emefiele had noted.
A forensic audit commissioned by the new board of directors, led by Dr. Okwu Joseph Nnanna, a deputy governor, who represents the interest of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), had exposed different levels of procedural abuse at NEXIM.
According to one source, before Nnanna’s appointment as NEXIM board chairman in March 2018, its NPL stood at about N48.9bn, out of its total loan portfolio of N53bn far above its permissible 10% benchmark.
Investdata further learned that about 181 of 191 loans granted before Nnanna’s assumption of office were non-performing, even as a third of the supporting documents could not be supported or verified to justify the loan applications and subsequent disbursements.
It is part of a grand design to stop the unearthing of such monumental fraud perpetrated by the past management, close watchers of events at NEXIM believe that a group- Awareness for Good Governance Group (AGGG) recently called for the removal of as Nnanna as chairman.
The protesters, on Thursday, April 30, 2019, accused Nnanna of not being qualified to chair the NEXIM board, wrongly described him as “a former Deputy Governor (Economic Policies) at the CBN.”
Nnanna is still a serving DG of the apex bank.
Princess Ajibola, convener of the group had expressed regret at “the fraudulent and nepotistic crave of Dr. Nnana, who has soiled his already filthy hands with cans of worms without traces of professional approach and has proven to the world that he is not fit to occupy any public office; not even a treasurer of any hamlet developmental union much less of a reputed public treasury like NEXIM Bank.”
But reacting, NEXIM management had in a statement on Thursday dismissed the allegations as unfounded, misleading “and targeted at tarnishing “the reputation of Dr. Nnanna as well as diverting attention from the on-going efforts by the board to address cases of gross mismanagement and poor state of affairs of the Bank under the old management which had since been sacked by the government of President Muhammadu Buhari.”
The management also announced plans for a media briefing on the situation on Monday, May 6, 2019.